Liam Gillick at Gwangju Museum of Art

The Work Life Effect is Liam Gillick’s first major solo museum exhibition in Asia. The exhibition continues the artist’s interest in questions of production, various modes of work and an endless search for a contemporary abstraction. The title directly refers to this – alluding to the complex tensions between work and life. The Work Life Effect proposes a zone where we sense the effects of the merging of work and life that has accelerated in the digital period and under the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition does not directly illustrate such processes, rather it evokes a twilight mood of lights, forms and affects that bring forward how emotional and formal aspects of perception and experience are altered when we are subjected to new modes of mediated existence.

Animated lamps lure us into a liminal space where work and life have merged. The outside has been brought inside. Large neon mathematical formulas flood the museum with colored light and show ways to calculate human happiness. Two large “storefronts” are sited in the centre of the space. Each appears to have large glazed illuminated panels. In fact the windows are empty and lead us into a space of abstraction and a space where a piano sits while black snow softly falls.

An important aspect of the exhibition extends to the lobby of the museum and the book lounge. These spaces will be furnished with low tables and stools that provide spaces for informal gathering, study and research. A program of education, performance and video streaming will be produced in these spaces and in the exhibition itself.

An exhibition catalogue is forthcoming.